Columnists From England

"The way we love our jobs and the way we love our country are similar to the way we love abusive partners. This, crucially, is how neoliberal white supremacist patriarchy is different from other power systems like feudalism, or early Protestant capitalism, or direct colonial rule, or theocracy. Rather than claiming that God created human hierarchy and telling people they should be happy with their lot, modern liberal democracies gaslight people into believing that they are already free."

"If we want to be free, the women of the 21st century need to stop playing the game. We need to end our wary efforts to believe that our bodies are acceptable and begin to know, with a clear and billiant certainty, that our persons are powerful."

"We cannot fuck our way to freedom. Sexuality alone, and heterosexuality in particular, is never enough to destabilise complex architectures of money and power. Without political agitation, sex can always be co-opted, calcifying gender revolution into another weary parade of saleable binary stereotypes."

"Marginalised bodies do marginalised work. Bodies that are garroted and controlled can be persuaded to do work that is underpaid and overlooked. Slavemaking is a social science, and nowhere is that science more expertly demonstrated than in the continued ability of contemporary industrial culture to persuade women perform the vast majority of vital domestic and caring labour without expecting reward or payment."

"The biggest question left by this book, though, is: "Why?" Penny claims not to be a woman, and claims furthermore that women have no shared qualities as a group, so why identify with feminism at all?"

"I am not interested in hearing out the ideas of the far right, because there are no new ideas on the far right. There are only new recruits. And every time progressives sacrifice the public good on the altar of personal purity, there will be more."

"If we deny racists a platform, they feed off the appearance of censorship, but if we give them a platform, they’ve won by being respectfully invited into the mainstream. Either way, what matters to them is not debate, but attention."

"The first time that white supremacists are denied a formal public platform, they get to plead martyrdom, to call the opposition cowards. And the second time. And the third time. But there’s only so many times you can whine that people aren’t paying you enough attention before those same people get bored and lose interest."

"It’s a mistake to think that the far right cares about the free speech debate as anything other than a way of confusing the enemy. The far right doesn’t have a profound philosophy, it has a media strategy."

"It is staggeringly clear that formal debate is failing to stop white supremacy. This is not an abstract philosophical issue. White supremacy is here, at the heart of world governments."

"Further, it should be clear that meat in itself as protein is not much superior to eggs or nuts and could not alter the evolution of the brain – if this were so, this miracle food would have continued to enlarge humans’ brain size in succeeding years when much greater amounts of meat were consumed."

"I'm not sorry for stealing my husband from his wife."

"Women don’t want equal treatment, they couldn’t handle it if they got it. It’s a tough world out there. What a lot of women are actually looking for is special treatment. What women need to realise is that they have to toughen up."

"Would I employ you if you were obese? No I would not. You would give the wrong impression to the clients of my business. I need people to look energetic, professional and efficient. If you are obese you look lazy."

"Ramadan typically brings a spike in violence in Middle East. I get grumpy when I don't eat - but I don't blow things up. Religion of peace?"

"The difference between most mothers and me is that I didn't sit around drinking coffee at baby group for 12 months after the birth of my baby. No, in three weeks I was back in my suit, back at my desk earning profit for my business and I don’t see why other women shouldn't do the same."

"It makes a lot of sense to me. She seems to me like a Jewish woman, the way she thinks and behaves."

"She was the wildest, funniest, cleverest, wittiest and the most bonkers of all of us."

"I can assure the Right Honorable Gentleman that in this house I see myself as a colossal god-king, a powerful beast from another realm, blessed with the powers of destruction, and I will run through the Palace of Westminster, lashing at all I encounter with the metal prong-whips. And all shall perish."

"Under David Cameron, we have this situation where you now need more qualifications to work as a shift manager at McDonald's than to become a teacher."

"Stuart Wheeler says women are no good at poker?! If he fancies playing a bit of Heads Up, he knows where to find me."

"If your opponent imagines that because you are a woman you’re easy to bluff, that you’d never bluff yourself and that you can be pushed around, you can exploit those assumptions."

"It has been said (by Shelley Winters) that a pretty face is a passport. But it's not - it's a visa, and it runs out fast."

"The freedom that women were supposed to have found in the Sixties largely boiled down to easy contraception and abortion; things to make life easier for men, in fact."

"Prostitution is the supreme triumph of capitalism.... Worst of all, prostitution reinforces all the old dumb clichés about women's sexuality; that they are not built to enjoy sex and are little more than walking masturbation aids, things to be DONE TO, things so sensually null and void that they have to be paid to indulge in fornication, that women can be had, bought, as often as not sold from one man to another. When the sex war is won prostitutes should be shot as collaborators for their terrible betrayal of all women, for the moral tarring and feathering they give indigenous women who have had the bad luck to live in what they make their humping ground."

"A good part — and definitely the most fun part — of being a feminist is about frightening men. American and Australian feminists have always known this, and absorbed it cheerfully into their act; one thinks of julienning men on phone- in shows, or telling us that a good feminist is rude to a man at least three times a day on principle. Of course, there's a lot more to feminism... but scaring the shit out of scumbags is an amusing and necessary part because, sadly, a good many men still respect nothing but strength,"

"Whenever I am sent a new book on the lively arts, the first thing I do is look for myself in the index."

"I got through the sexual side of my first marriage - for six years! - by pretending that my husband was my friend Peter York."

"Will [Self] loomed over my second marriage, lurked throughout my very enjoyable six months of lesbianism, and has seen considerable active service in my rich and strange inner life over the years since then."

"Tears are sometimes an inappropriate response to death. When a life has been lived completely honestly, completely successfully, or just completely, the correct response to death's perfect punctuation mark is a smile."

"We may be saddled with Bush and Blair, but you've got Prince Charles (a big friend of the Islamic world, probably because of its large number of feudal kingdoms and hardline attitude to uppity women), the Catholic church (taking a brief break from buggering babies to condemn any western attack as "morally unacceptable") and posturing pansies such as Sean Penn, Sheryl Crow and Damon Albarn."

"Cherie Blair can call herself a feminist all she likes, but any feminist worth her salt would have made a point of having a termination - on the NHS, naturally - when she got knocked up the last time. . . Famous women would rather admit to having been sexually abused as children than to having had a termination. . . Myself, I'd as soon weep over my taken tonsils or my absent appendix as snivel over those [five] abortions. I had a choice, and I chose life - mine."

"The only kind of socialist to be is a Stalinist, and the only kind of woman to be is a Bitch."

"A woman who looks like a girl and thinks like a man is the best sort, the most enjoyable to be with and the most pleasurable to have and to hold."

"Writing is more than anything a compulsion, like some people wash their hands thirty times a day for fear of awful consequences if they do not. It pays a whole lot better than this type of compulsion, but it is no more heroic."

"Burchill divides up the chosen people into Good Jews (hardliners, Israelites) and Bad Jews (liberal Jews) with the enthusiasm of an antisemite. Hilariously, she sets herself up as the Jewishness Police, railing against Jews who are not Jewish enough; and one of those, it turns out, is her local rabbi, Elli Tikvah Sarah. Burchill rails against the rabbi for, in this order: ignoring a bottle of champagne Burchill gave her in favour of elderflower wine made by the rabbi’s girlfriend; "canoodling" with said girlfriend ("a Sapphic free-for-all", sneers the heretofore not exactly prudish Burchill), and advocating a dialogue with Islam. Burchill doesn’t include this in the book but, according to Rabbi Sarah, Burchill emailed the synagogue’s congregants railing that "your rabbi respects PIG ISLAM". Aww, being used as a launchpad for a British columnist’s racism – we’re living in the Promised Land now, fellow Jews!"

"[On the comment about Islam.] I could have done a big public exposure [...] But what I did was email her and said: "Julie, firstly this is deeply, deeply offensive. Both Jews and Muslims don’t eat pig. I don’t know what you’re doing but this is really unacceptable and offensive. I was incredibly polite.""

"The problem is she doesn’t have any in-depth knowledge. I can imagine her endlessly watching the film Exodus with Paul Newman. She’s got a kind of Hollywood view of Jews. You know, ‘Jews are so clever, we’ve survived ..."

"His [Churchill's] power over the fate of Prince of Wales was absolute and direct. He sent the ship ... into mortal peril. its combination military folly, and of boyish Churchillian posturing, is striking."

"It is most peculiar. The very Tories who most dislike what has happened to Britain in the last half-century or so — permissiveness, etc — are the very ones who most want to preserve the independence of the nation state responsible for doing all the damage. At any rate that is the impression one gets from a new book entitled The Abolition of Britain (Quartet Books) by that redoubtable Tory nationalist, Peter Hitchens. For, after eloquently telling the tale of how successive British parliamentary governments, Tory as much as Labour. have 'abolished' old Britain, he reaches the wholly illogical conclusion that that same British democracy alone is quite capable of putting the clock back. If only it were."

"Peter Hitchens's book ... can also be read as an obituary for the old Daily Express. When Hitchens joined the paper, in 1977, it was still the voice of grumpy suburban reactionaries. Now it is edited by a founder of Spare Rib magazine and owned by a Blairite. Even the word Daily has been dropped from the title. Hitchens is the sole survivor of Fleet Street's Mary Celeste, raging against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

"A very useful book is published today. Mad, obnoxious, elegantly written incoherent nonsense, it draws up the true battle lines of politics now far better than many of the attempts to summarise the slippery Third Way or the heart of Blairism. ... This absurdly over the top book ... is a joyful read for liberals. Most of it is given over to eulogies about the past that have precisely the opposite effect of the one intended. It will make any sane person whoop with glee to be alive now and not then. It will confirm every good liberal's trust in human progress. Things really are getting better and better."

"When the political history of the Blair era is written, it may well be concluded that the most effective conservative opposition came not from politicians, but journalists. It often seems that the charge against New Labour is led by the Telegraph and Spectator, by Charles Moore and Boris Johnson, or from some Murdoch journalists, rather than by William Hague. So perhaps it should not comes [sic] as a complete surprise that the most sustained, internally logical and powerful attack on Tony Blair and all his works should be a polemic by a right-wing journalist, Peter Hitchens, rather than a Tory pamphlet or an MP's speech. ... On much of this agenda, Hitchens is simply out of time. ... [T]he idea of a widespread return to a belief in literal damnation, to public hostility towards homosexuals and the shaming of single mothers, seems utterly implausible."

"My Friend and colleague, Peter Hitchens, is incandescent with vexation. He has received a very disparaging (and to my mind wholly unfair) review of his new book The Abolition of Britain — From Lady Chatterley to Tony Blair from Gerald Kaufman MP, writing in The Daily Telegraph. Mr Kaufman's sneering view is not a surprise, given the man's liberal-left-secularist attitudes. But The Daily Telegraph is. Peter imagined that the one newspaper which would understand his evocation of the conservative and Christian values that England once espoused should be The Daily Telegraph. He knows he will get a hostile review from The Guardian and The Independent. The liberal-left establishment always give him a hard time, though they always look after their own. His book, published this week by Quartet, is a series of knowledgeable and perceptive linked essays in the tradition of George Orwell, analysing the way that this country has changed since the death of Sir Winston Churchill in 1965."

"To him [Hitchens] "over-use of private cars" is "crazed", rehousing of slum dwellers "deportation", defence spending cuts "pitiless" employment of women "conscription", anti-gun laws "demented", the Plowden report on education simultaneously "tragic", "nauseating" and "drivel". This is Paul Johnson without the sense of humour. ... Again, I am ready to offer a small prize (say, a copy — indeed my copy — of this book) to anyone who can explain what Hitchens means in asserting that "Abolishing the Greater London Council created the precedent for abolishing the House of Lords"; or how "our monarchy" was "robbed of much of its role by the Tory decision to elect party leaders". ... When I finished reading this book, I thought I had better have a bracing cold shower. However, it then occurred to me that the whole thing might be a sustained spoof. If so, I have to admit that, although it goes on a bit, it is very effective."

"I'll be accused...of defending "Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor", as we must now call him, in French-Revolutionary style, as I think Marie Antoinette ended up being called "The Widow Capet" in the same fashion."

"The funeral of Winston Churchill in 1965 turned out to be the burial of the British Empire. The funeral of Queen Elizabeth next week will probably be the obsequies of the United Kingdom."

"It is a fantasy to believe that you punish politicians by throwing them out of office. It is when they leave office that they start making the real money."

"I have pursued a lone heresy of wondering why NATO even survived the end of its enemies, the USSR and the Warsaw Pact. Do we still maintain alliances against Austria-Hungary or the Ottomans? I can find no trace of them. Perhaps, overlooked in some elegant Paris street and living off ancient funds, elderly, learned men still occupy these joyous sinecures, hoping that they will not be found out."

"We have treated Russia with amazing stupidity. Now we pay the price for that. We had the chance to make her an ally, friend and partner. Instead we turned her into an enemy by insulting a great and proud country with greed, unearned superiority, cynicism, contempt and mistrust."